US Africa Command on Monday night announced that its forces launched another airstrike in Somalia, as the Trump administration continues its record-shattering bombing campaign in the country.
AFRICOM said the strike targeted al-Shabaab in the vicinity of Saacow, a village in Somalia’s southern Lower Juba region. The command offered no other details about the attack, as it stopped sharing casualty estimates and assessments of potential civilian harm last year.
“Specific details about units and assets will not be released to ensure continued operations security,” AFRICOM said in its press release.
Based on AFRICOM’s numbers, the attack marks at least the 82nd US airstrike in Somalia this year, though there are signs that the US is not announcing each strike in the country.
The US has also been conducting an air war against an ISIS affiliate in Somalia’s northeastern Puntland region, and Drop Site News recently reported that a US strike was carried out in the region on September 3, though it has not been claimed by AFRICOM.
According to numbers from New America, an organization that tracks the air war and also counts airstrikes that are reported but not claimed by the US, the September 8 strike would bring the total number of US bombings in Somalia this year to 84.
The US has been involved in Somalia for decades and has been fighting al-Shabaab since the George W. Bush administration backed an Ethiopian invasion in 2006 that ousted the Islamic Courts Union, a Muslim coalition that briefly held power in Mogadishu after taking the city from CIA-backed warlords.
Al-Shabaab was the radical offshoot of the Islamic Courts Union, and its first recorded attack was a suicide bombing in 2007 that targeted Ethiopian troops occupying Mogadishu. It wasn’t until 2012 that the group pledged loyalty to al-Qaeda. The ISIS affiliate in Puntland started as an offshoot of al-Shabaab and first emerged in 2015.
